Big data: hype or transformation?

IDC predicts that the market for big data technology and services will hit $32.4 billion in 2017, nearly doubling the predicted size for 2015 and an impressive 10 times the size it was in 2010. That estimate includes infrastructure software such as security and datacenter management, and high performance data analysis. Predictions from Wikibon are even higher, at $47 billion for 2017, although its definition of big data is broader than some.

The factors driving the growth are well recognized at this point—the availability of large amounts of incoming data and new technology are combining to produce an ideal opportunity. But how much is hype and how much is real? “Big data represents a true paradigm shift,” says Brian Hopkins, VP and principal analyst at Forrester. “The scale fundamentally changes the way that business gets done, because when you put all the information together, you really can find the needle in the haystack.”

A large telecommunications company wanted to improve its customer experience by detecting and resolving issues as they arose. The company selected the Vitria Operational Intelligence (OI) solution. The goal was to analyze network events and customer-related streaming data to provide insights that can be immediately acted upon to improve service and increase customer retention.

The company uses Vitria OI to aggregate and correlate events from many different sources, detect patterns as they occur and respond proactively. “Vitria OI correlates network and cell site performance issues with call failure rates in real time to help the client identify the specific customers that are being affected,” says Dale Skeen, co-founder and CTO of Vitria. The client can then initiate re-routing of calls or load shedding to prevent a shutdown, or take other action.